Federal subjects of Russia

• 1. Introduction

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  The federal subjects of Russia numbered 89 when the country's current constitution took force on the 25th of December 1993. Each of those subjects sends exactly two delegates to the Federation Council, Russia's upper house of parliament. That holds whether the subject is a small okrug or a vast republic. Sakha, in the far east, spans more than 3 million square kilometres of Siberian terrain. The Nenets Autonomous Okrug, in the far northwest, holds just over 41,000 people. Between those extremes lie republics, krais, oblasts, cities of federal importance, an autonomous oblast, and autonomous okrugs. What rights and powers do these very different units actually hold? And how has the list of subjects grown in ways that most of the world does not accept?

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• 2. Six Kinds of Territory

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  Dagestan, in the North Caucasus, names thirteen distinct ethnic groups as its titular peoples. That range makes it the most internally diverse of Russia's republics. Each republic holds its own constitution, its own recognized language, and its own legislature. The federal government represents republics in international affairs. Republics are offered more autonomy than any other type of federal subject.

  The word 'krai' means 'frontier' or 'territory' in Russian. That name carries a historical meaning tied to geographic borderlands. None of the current krais sit on a frontier; the designation is now purely historic.

  Kaliningrad Oblast sits on the Baltic coast, cut off from the rest of Russia by other countries. Oblasts form the most common category of federal subject. A governor heads each one, and a locally elected legislature provides regional oversight. Most are named after their administrative centres.

  Moscow and Saint Petersburg hold the designation of cities of federal importance. Each encompasses smaller cities and towns: Zelenograd and Troitsk in Moscow's case, Kronstadt and Kolpino in Saint Petersburg's. Moscow's population exceeds 13 million. Saint Petersburg holds nearly 5.6 million people.

  On the 3rd of July 1991, four of Russia's five autonomous oblasts were reclassified as republics. Only the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, established in 1934 in the Russian Far East, retains that status. Autonomous okrugs, the sixth category, each designate an ethnic minority as their titular people. All but Chukotka operate simultaneously as a federal subject and as part of either Arkhangelsk Oblast or Tyumen Oblast.

  Whatever the differences in autonomy between types, all subjects hold equal rights in their relations with federal government bodies. Those rights, and the legal architecture that defined them, stretch back to a system built long before 1993.

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• 3. The Soviet Foundation

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  Vladimir Lenin's model of Soviet government, introduced in 1918, rested on two formal guarantees. One was unlimited sovereignty for the federation's constituent entities; the other was a formal right to secede from the country. In practice, secession was never permitted. But the legal architecture survived for decades, persisting into the structure of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and beyond.

  When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, Russia inherited its internal structure intact. The pressure from within intensified the following year. Contemporaries described what followed as a 'parade of sovereignties'. Separatist sentiment and what was called the War of Laws strained relations between Moscow and the regions. The Russian regions responded by signing the Federation Treaty in 1992. That agreement established how authority and powers would be divided between the central government and its constituent entities. The treaty was then incorporated into the text of the 1978 Constitution of the Russian SFSR.

  On the 12th of December 1993, Russian voters approved a new constitution by federal referendum. When it came into force, the document formally abolished the system Lenin had introduced 75 years earlier. It eliminated a number of accumulated legal conflicts, reserved the rights of the regions, and introduced local self-government. Critically, it removed the Soviet-era right to secede. The primacy of federal law and the country's territorial integrity were now unambiguous.

  By the late 1990s, the system had moved closer, in legal terms, to the pattern of other modern federal states. The following decade would pull it in a different direction.

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• 4. Power Flowing to Moscow

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  Vladimir Putin's governments in the 2000s, backed by the United Russia party, redirected authority from the regions toward the centre. The Russian parliament changed how tax revenues were distributed between federal and regional budgets. The number of elections held within the regions was also reduced. Federal authorities gained new powers that the subjects had previously held.

  What this centralization meant for the formal count of federal subjects would become apparent in 2014.

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• 5. Annexation and Dispute

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  Mergers between 1993 and 2008 brought the number of Russia's federal subjects from their post-constitution total down to 83. Those were internal reorganizations, agreed within Russia's own borders. What came next involved foreign territory.

  Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. The Russian government declared Sevastopol and the Republic of Crimea to be the 84th and 85th federal subjects. That claim is not recognized internationally.

  In 2022, during Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the government in Moscow announced four more annexations. The territories were the Ukrainian oblasts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia. Each has a Russian-appointed head. All four remain internationally recognized as Ukrainian territory. Russian forces occupy parts of each but do not control them in full.

  Sevastopol alone among the six contested territories holds the classification of a federal city. The precise name to give that status, and others like it, remained a matter of professional dispute long before these annexations took place.

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• 6. What's in a Name

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  At the 2008 American Translators Association conference, a translator named Tom Fennell made the case for precision. The official English translation of Russia's constitution uses 'constituent entity of the Russian Federation'. Fennell argued that this was the better rendering. The alternative, 'subject of the Russian Federation', carried misleading implications.

  In 2011, Tamara Nekrasova, Head of the Translation Department at Goltsblat BLP, returned to the argument at a translators conference. Her reasoning was direct: 'subject would be OK for a monarchy,' she said. Russia is a republic, and the monarchic connotation of 'subject' does not fit.

  An official government translation of Russia's constitution uses 'constituent entities', the form both Fennell and Nekrasova endorsed. The Garant-Internet translation takes the opposing position: 'subjects of the Russian Federation'. ISO 3166-2 is the international standard for country subdivision codes. In a newsletter dated the 30th of June 2010, it assigned its own set of English terms to Russia's subdivisions. Those labels do not consistently match either of the two translations that legal professionals continue to debate.

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